Is it a good idea to run Redmine using Webrick through Nginx?

Question

The task here is to get Redmine setup for a small (<20) team. There may be a few users who would access the setup as business clients. I am familiar with setting up PHP for Apache, and recently, Nginx. I am not familiar with Ruby, Ruby-On-Rails, etc. I prefer to use the OS's (Ubuntu Linux LTS) package manager to install the different components as it takes care of dependencies and updates.

I have setup Nginx with PHP-FPM successfully and am struggling with Redmine.

As suggested here, I got Redmine running on port 3000.

# /etc/init/redmine.conf
# Redmine

description "Redmine" 

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

expect daemon
exec ruby /usr/share/redmine/script/server webrick -e production -b 0.0.0.0 -d

And using the Nginx config on this page, I used Nginx to proxy requests to Webrick.

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  myredmine.example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;

    }
}

This works well locally. I wanted some opinions before trying this out on the live box (a 256 MB VPS).

Further, should I use something like monit to monitor webrick for failure?

Answer 1

You should always use monit or similar for tools you don't trust.

Note that webrick is more of a reference http implementation in MRI, and doesn't scale well at all. To the point that puppetlabs considered it could only serve up to 10-20 hosts reliably, and that's with the nodes talking to the server only every 30 minutes !

I've had a great experience with Phusion Passenger on both Apache and nginx, but only Apache for production.

Mongrel is also very solid and its integration is covered on the nginx wiki.